Laura De Marco

Photographer
Like Leaves on Trees
Location: Bologna, Italy
Nationality: Italian
Biography:  Laura De Marco is a photographer, photography educator and curator working between Italy and New York City. She is one of the two founders and directors of the center of photography Spazio Labo’, a non-profit organization devoted to... MORE
Public Story
Like Leaves on Trees
Copyright Laura De Marco 2024
Updated Jan 2014
Topics Abandonment, Architecture, Borders, Brooklyn, Capitalism, Community, Conceptual, Documentary, Environment, Environmental, Globalization, Landscape, Loss, Personal, Photography

My interest in this project lies in investigating the urbanized landscape and the multifaceted relationships between the built and the natural environments in such contest. My visual research questions the notion of urban territory and its social-psycho-geographical changes as human beings shape it accordingly to their needs. I’m interested in the consequences that these changes cause on human beings themselves and on the perception they have of the environment built around them; I’m also interested in the impact of these changes on the remaining signs of nature in the places where we live. It is a personal reflection on our consumerist society and the value it gives to the notion of time and heritage, reflected in the way we conceive our urban environment.

Besides, my research incorporates a personal journey into the notions of past and present, death and life and into the feelings of both loss and gain that they convey. It implies an interest in looking at what we lose along our journey through time and at what we take as heritage for the future. The landscape we build has always been a great metaphor for these notions and through it I find a way of looking at the infinite moments of transition in our lives.

Like leaves on Trees investigates the perennial dance between human actions and nature reactions in the urban landscape. We cyclically pave the landscape we live in but nature cyclically comes back, through the cracks in the sidewalks, to retake the landscape. In this constant “ballet” some fragile spaces are created, in a time that is suspended in a “third” dimension, not present nor past. We daily walk through these spaces in our cities, but not so often we stop to think about the effects of human actions on them and inevitably the cycle restarts and these spaces are paved again and all their traces are canceled forever.

This series of photographs has been taken in Williamsburg, one of the neighborhoods of the Brooklyn borough of the city of New York, since 2011. The project is on-going.

 

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